July 2017

Consumer Experience

Blade Runner: outdoor advertising in a Sci-Fi future.

The setting of the original Blade Runner was a gritty, dark, dystopian Los Angeles of 2019. The film itself depicts a future where technology is so sophisticated that the only way to tell the difference between human and robot is to conduct a Voight-Kampff test: a fictional emotional response test unit that operates similarly to the polygraph.

Typical of the sci-fi genre its ‘Replicants’ are the perfect demonstration of futuristic science and technology. The films cityscapes are visually striking, with the expected flying cars, impressive buildings and appropriate urban density.

One of the more memorable visuals from the film is the enormous outdoor digital billboard displaying a Japanese Geisha. This visual loops through footage of the Geisha swallowing a pill, advertising birth control to a mass audience.

Given the sophisticated advancements in robotics and technology demonstrated in the development of the Replicants, it always puzzled me that large scale LED billboards and neon signage were the best they could do with OOH (Out of Home) advertising of the future. However, as we approach 2019, the year in which the original Blade Runner was set, I’m now more disappointed that the billboard treatment of the film is far more accurate than any of the other depictions of technological advancement.

Perhaps, in theory, the purpose and function of billboard advertising hasn’t changed since the first 24-sheet billboard was displayed at the Paris Exposition back in 1889. It remains a format with high visual impact, that can’t be turned off or blocked, providing high reach to a mass audience while promoting brand awareness and recall.

While there have been advancements in DOOH (Digital Out-of-Home) that are more in keeping with my vision of billboard advertising in 2019 I am please to be reading more frequently about groundbreaking advancements in technology being tested and patented. UK based Lightvert have recently commenced fundraising for ECHO technology; described as being ‘a revolutionary new type of patent-protected persistence of vision (PoV) display technology that will temporarily and safely print an image directly onto the viewers’s retina’. The image itself doesn’t exist in reality, but only in the viewer’s eye’ for an impressive demonstration check out their product ECHO Video.

So while we may not all be flying around in our cars with our over-populated cities being infiltrated by Nexus 6 Replicants we can rest assured that our DOOH technology is coming along in leaps and bounds. It will be interesting to see what the anticipated future of advertising holds for us in 2049 (good to see Atari making a comeback)!